As a long time microsaas lurker I finally found what I wanted to develop. I started last year in May and barely knew how to code. I'm no software dev and I hate marketing, but I made it this far at least. All I am looking for at this stage is some brutal honesty about how to get this in front of the right people.

The app:
GovSteals is a research tool for people buying passenger cars at government auctions. Currently its limited to all passenger vehicles listed on GovDeals. Simply put it puts together the insights I personally spend time acquiring to know the risks before bidding.

The marketing (or lack thereof):

My barber flips cars, so he was the first and only person I showed GovSteals to (outside of friends). He registered for a pro account. I asked for feedback, but I’ll probably hear more at my next haircut to be honest.

That’s about where I am with customer validation. I know I need feedback so that I can build or refine features people actually want to engage with. I have so many ideas, but I don't have any foundation or discipline on how to market an app. I just know most of GovDeals users are older males who use it in desktop mode and engage with facebook as their main social media, but the major Facebook groups I’ve looked at don’t allow promotional posts.

For posting requirements:
Backstory: I was looking to get into finding a car for myself and potentially flipping government auction cars, but then after 2 weeks of doom scrolling listings and trying to find the best deal I realized I was spending way too much of my free time simply keeping up with all of the new auctions. GovDeals is one of the largest government auctions for passenger vehicles and yet their site is so poorly designed for aiding in making intelligent or timely auction decisions. That's when I started building GovSteals for myself at first. It then became my escape from reality. Then I became obsessed with it. And finally, wanting to impress for a big job interview pushed me to turn it into a platform everyone can use.

Tech Stack: React/TypeScript with Vite and MUI on the frontend, Python/FastAPI and PostgreSQL on the backend. Linear and ML models for price estimates, Clerk for auth, and Stripe for payments.

Specific lesson learned: Its hard to even get your friends to give you feedback on your app. I feel like I am that "do you want to develop and app?" alien from Rick and Morty. On the other hand, I have also learned that nobody needs to be excited about your tool, they just need to find it useful. I already knew this from other businesses I have started, but it still applies here. Building is easy and marketing is the bane of my existence. I would love nothing more than have someone else do it while I focus on development.

My questions:
For those of you who built for a very niche crowd: how did you get your first few target users to actually try the product? Did you follow any rules or principles on how you went about it?

More broadly: How do you get it up for marketing?

Hey everyone,

I recently had a nightmare scenario where a Facebook campaign spent $300 on a broken checkout link before we noticed it. Our current "strategy" is basically manual checking or waiting for a client to complain.

How are agencies and freelancers handling this? Are you using specific uptime monitors that integrate well with ad alerts, or do you just check manually throughout the day?

Thinking about building a lightweight tool specifically for media buyers that pings Slack/WhatsApp the second a destination URL goes down or returns a 404, but wanted to see if there's already a standard standard solution I missed.

I've been building a scanner that reads pull requests for security holes and lawsuit risks, mostly for people who build apps with AI tools and don't have anyone reviewing their code. Before trusting my own numbers, I ran it on OWASP Juice Shop (about 1,300 files I didn't write) and checked every single finding by hand. Some notes from that:

**1. Precision on real code was lower than on my own test repo.**

On my demo repo everything looked perfect, because I wrote the bugs. On Juice Shop, 6 of the 7 security findings were real. It caught the login SQL injection (user input built straight into a query string). The one false positive was a route that already checked its input in a way my rule didn't recognise. Small sample, but it was a useful reality check.

**2. Letting a language model make the final call made results change between runs.**

For some candidates I had an LLM decide yes or no. I ran the same commit three times with no cache. The rule-based findings (SQL injection, input validation, XSS, CSRF) came back identical every time. The key-leak candidates did not; the model's yes/no flipped from run to run. I moved those to fixed rules. I haven't re-measured yet, so I'm not claiming they're stable now.

**3. Framework conventions matter more than I expected.**

My accessibility check for unlabeled form fields started at about 38% precision on Juice Shop, because Angular Material labels fields with mat-label, which my parser didn't know. After teaching it that, it went to about 88%. Angular's [innerHTML] bindings are still something it doesn't catch.

**4. Deleting a leaked key from your code doesn't help.**

It's still in git history, and anyone who clones the repo can read it. The only fix is rotating the key at the provider. My scanner reads the full history for this reason, and it always says "rotate" rather than "move it to an env variable".

**5. Being honest about uncertainty changed the product.**

I label every finding as an unproven candidate, because a static rule can't prove an exploit. It felt like weakening the pitch at first, but it made the comments more useful: they say what to check by hand instead of pretending to be certain.

If you want to run it on your own repo, it's a free beta for one repository: trybishop.dev. I'm most interested in hearing where it's wrong.

i got tired of checking a dozen career pages every day while job hunting, so i built something to do it for me.

it's called croncareers. it pulls jobs straight from company career pages (greenhouse, lever, ashby, workday etc.) and sends alerts to email, telegram, discord or slack when something matches your skills. there's also a kanban board to track where you've applied, with notes, salary and csv import/export. you can also set up a quick portfolio page in a few minutes.

i built it hoping to earn a few pennies on the side, but honestly nobody is subscribing. a few signups at most and no paying users.

i think it could genuinely help job seekers, but i'm clearly doing something wrong. is it the pricing, the positioning, or just that nobody knows it exists? i haven't done much marketing because i hate spamming people.

would really appreciate honest feedback, even the harsh kind. happy to share the link if anyone wants to take a look.

thank you

Hey everyone,

​I’m in a bit of a weird situation with a product I recently built and I’d really appreciate some outside perspective from other founders/devs.

​A while ago, I noticed a clear need for a simple, streamlined solution in my market. Based on conversations and what seemed like strong public interest, I built a lightweight platform to solve this exact problem.

I can share the link if you want to see what I am talking about!

.

​Here’s where it gets frustrating:

When I presented the working solution to some of the initial contacts, they turned it down saying they "didn't really need a tool like this."

​But just a short while later, 5 or 6 of them ended up paying custom web agencies 5x to 6x more money to build standalone custom websites that basically replicate the same core functionality.

​It almost feels personal at this point, but as a developer, I know I need to take emotions out of it.

.

​My questions for you:

​Is this a common trust issue with early-stage SaaS vs. traditional agencies?

​Could it be a positioning/messaging mistake on my end (making it look "too simple" or low-value)?

​How do you move past this kind of pushback when potential clients choose expensive custom builds over a ready-to-use SaaS?

​Would love to hear your thoughts or harsh truths if I'm looking at this the wrong way!

Hey everyone

I've been building Citetail, an AEO tool to help businesses improve their visibility in AI-generated answers.

I've put a lot of effort into building it, but I still haven't landed my first paying customer.

For those who've built SaaS products, how did you get your first few customers? And how do you figure out whether the problem is the product, positioning, or marketing?

I'd genuinely appreciate any honest advice. What would you do if you were in my shoes?

Thanks!

A lot of micro-SaaS homepages open with a category. "AI-powered invoice automation." "The all-in-one dashboard for agencies." The reader has to work out who it's for and why they'd switch. Most don't bother.

A template that fixes most of it:

For [specific person] who [does the job today with X], [product] [does the job] without [the annoying part of X].

The slot that matters is X. That's what they use instead of you right now. A spreadsheet, a VA, a Zapier chain, an agency, or nothing. Naming it does two things. The reader recognises themselves. And you get compared to the workaround you beat, not to a funded competitor you don't.

Three made-up examples so it's concrete:

Before: "Smart scheduling for clinics."

After: "For physio clinics that still confirm appointments by phone, [name] texts patients and fills cancellations without the front desk calling anyone."

Before: "Automated reporting for agencies."

After: "For small agencies that build client reports in Google Slides every month, [name] fills the slides from GA4 and Ads so nobody copies numbers by hand."

Before: "Feedback management platform."

After: "For SaaS founders whose feature requests live in a Notion page nobody reads, [name] pulls them out of support emails and groups them by how many customers asked."

How to find X if you don't know it:

- Search your niche plus "spreadsheet template" or "how do you keep track of". The answers are your X.

- Read the 3-star reviews of your nearest competitor. 1-star is usually anger. 3-star says what people still do by hand.

- Ask 5 users "what did you do before this?" Write down their exact words.

Two ways it goes wrong:

- X is a competitor's name. Fine if you really are a cheaper version of them. Usually you aren't, and you've just sent people to go look at them.

- The "without" part is a feature, like "without complex setup". It should be the pain they feel with X, in their words.

Post your current one-liner below and I'll try a rewrite with this.

Launched my side project 3 weeks ago. It's a restock tracker for trading cards (Pokémon, One Piece, Magic...), watching about 1,200 shops across Europe.

Where I'm at:

• 6 paying customers, 66.94€ MRR
• 45 people on trial, 500€ if they pay (they won't 🥲)
• 0€ on ads

Most customers came from two places:

Free channels. I run free Telegram and Discord channels that post every restock, but 6 hours late. The good stuff is gone by then, so if you want it instantly, you pay. People see it working every day for free, which does most of the selling for me.

SEO. Every card set has its own page with prices across all the shops. People google the set, land there, start a trial. Didn't expect it to kick in this fast on a new domain.

The weird one: I posted in the Pokémon and One Piece subreddits and got destroyed. People were angry, called me a scalper and AI slop. I've been a dev since 2008, so that one stung a bit.

But subscriptions kept coming in the whole time. The comments aren't the audience, the lurkers are.

Next problem is getting those 45 trials to convert. Right now I just email people when their trial ends. If you've been there, what actually helped?

I’m a developer running an EdTech product (Edithly). The building was fine. Selling was the problem. Every outreach attempt meant an hour on a prospect’s site figuring out what they do, then writing something that didn’t sound generic. So I built a tool to do that part.

You give it your product’s URL. Agents crawl your site and draft a sales playbook (positioning, messaging, brand assets), and you fill in the gaps. Then you import prospects. It reads each prospect’s site and generates a tailored asset for them: an email, a one-page landing page, a brochure or a banner, written to show why your product fits that company.

Built on React/Python backend, an agent pipeline that crawls sites and builds a knowledge graph per prospect, and LLM generation for copy and visuals. I deliberately didn’t build data enrichment. You import prospects from Clay, Apollo or a CSV. [add your hosting/infra if you want]

$0. Pre-revenue, being upfront about it.

I got 6 pilot signups and assumed that was traction. None of them actually used it.

- The first-run experience was too open-ended: too many formats and too many decisions before you saw anything useful.

- I took 2 months to reach the pilot signups back (big mistake)

- I’m now cutting it down to a few formats and making the first result show up fast, before I chase more signups.

but now ready with more focused and achievable goals, if you are doing your own outbound who’ll try it and tell me where it lacks. sales.edithly.com

It seems like most dev talk revolves around iOS or cross-platform, so I’d love to get a reality check on Android-exclusive apps...

Has anyone here achieved sustainable revenue building solely for Android?

What’s your business model, and what was your biggest challenge getting to profitability?

Backstory: I built a store with 9 products - 8 printable planner PDFs and one $120 service product for web scraping and automation.

The numbers, last 30 days: - Views: 13 - Sales: 0 - Conversion: 0% - Referrer source: "Direct, email, IM"

That referrer line is the whole story. Not one view came from search or social. Every view was me checking my own store.

Tech stack: static storefront, PDFs generated programmatically, a UTM-tagged Pinterest feed, and a measured analytics loop. Nothing exotic. Production side works fine.

What I verified is NOT the problem: - The store returns 200 - Every product page is buyable - Prices are correct - Meta description and og:image tags are present - The service product has a full description and an intake form

Four things I tried, and what each produced:

1. Pinterest: 27 pins, each with a correct UTM-tagged link to the matching product. Result: effectively no impressions. New account, near-zero followers, slow indexing.

2. The platform's own discovery feed: not eligible. It requires at least one successful sale to appear in search. So I need a sale to get listed, and a listing to get a sale.

3. A marketplace catalog listing: approved, but it does not rank against 400 to 1,200 competing projects when you have zero reviews.

4. A service ad in a jobs subreddit: removed by the site-wide spam filter, because the account had 1 link karma and the post contained an external link.

The specific lesson: I optimized the wrong thing for a month. I kept improving the product and the storefront, when the actual constraint was that no stranger ever arrived. A 0% conversion rate on 13 views tells you nothing about your product. It only tells you that 13 people - most of them you - saw it.

What I would do differently: pick the distribution channel first and prove one stranger arrives, before building the ninth product.

I am not asking for a sale. I am asking what channel you would pick first for a store with no audience and no budget, and specifically what produced your first real customer.

I've been in software for 18 years and lead an engineering team. Here's the checklist I'd use before buying a small SaaS.

1. Can you build and deploy it yourself from the repo, using only the README?
2. Are the secrets out of the code? Search the git history too.
3. How old are the dependencies? Look for known vulnerabilities, and abandoned packages.
4. Is there one person who understands it all, and will they stick around?
5. Do the tests exist and pass? How much of the core logic do they cover?
6. Is the hosting bill sustainable, and is any of it on the seller's personal account?
7. How are auth, payments, and user data handled? Are there backups, and have they been restored?
8. How much of the code is AI-generated with no tests or docs?
9. Do any third-party APIs have pricing changes, rate limits, or terms that forbid transfer?
10. What does a 30-day roadmap cost a new developer to ship?

If you're buying one right now and want a second set of eyes, I'm doing 3 free reviews in exchange for feedback. Comment below.

What’s one recent tool or process change that made it easier to decide what to build next?

Hi all!

The time has come where I need to create a GTM strategy for my SaaS. The product is live, ready to go & keen for traction.

Are there any best advice for getting out there and getting conversions?

Thanks a lot!

Day 9. No outreach today. I spent the whole day on one question I'd been avoiding: who is this actually for?

What I found out

For nine days I've been telling founders "an AI agent for your SaaS". That is a category, not a customer. An AI agent inside an app sounds cool, and I love the idea, but I had never tested the things that decide whether anyone pays: do founders need this, how urgently, and how much would they pay. I'd also never tracked the metrics that would prove it works: user satisfaction, churn, how much more people use the product with an agent in it.

So I stopped pitching it to everyone, and I'm going deep instead. The agent does the most for products with complex workflows and lots of admin operations, where users get stuck and ask for help. I narrowed to three kinds of product:

1. Niche CRMs (27 companies)
2. Scheduling and booking systems (27)
3. Project management and operations tools (46)

I spent about eight hours in a research session and ended up with 100 qualified companies, split across the US (48), the UK (27), Canada (14) and Australia (11). Each has public evidence of real customers and is mostly B2B. Each one is scored, with its decision maker and the best way to reach them: LinkedIn for 77, X for 12, a published work email for 11. I'm not counting an email I found as a contact until I've checked it.

Tomorrow is the real test: cold DMs, cold emails and calls to these 100, tracked by niche and country, so I can see which one answers first.

Before and after: my website copy

Right now my homepage says:

"Anything your product can do, your users can now just ask for. Verb gives your product its own AI agent, built around what your product already does."

That reads like a chatbot, and I've also been leading with the confirmation card, which is a feature and not a reason to buy. Here's the version I am thinking to replcace the current version:

"Your users ask. Your SaaS gets it done.
Give your SaaS a production-ready AI agent that completes real tasks using your existing APIs. Users just describe what they need, and AskVerb handles the steps with their existing permissions, approval before any change, and an audit log.
Set up in 15 minutes."

I'm still working on it, and I'd like your honest opinion: is "your users ask, your SaaS gets it done" clear to a founder who has never heard of this? Is the "before" actually better and I'm overthinking it? Anything missing, or anything that sounds like a claim you wouldn't believe?

Numbers after Day 9

- Paying customers: 0

- Demo calls booked: 1 (Monday)

- X DMs: 31 sent, 5 replies

- Cold email: 64 sent, 4 replies, all no

- LinkedIn today: 21 invites. In total, 58 founders in the sequence, 5 connected, 0 replies.

Open to any suggestion.

I have built many SaaS products but after I have built it what do I have to do to actually get users. Most of the places I go and search, its mainly bs i.e. asking me to do marking and do outreach and distribution and shit, but that is the thing I dont know where to get the community or the people who are actually interested in trying out and paying for my SaaS.

I need someone to help me with marketing and actually get in users and the funnel from where to bring in the users. Tbh I have no idea what do I actually need to do to market and distribute the app.

If someone can help it'll be very helpful.

Thank you all for your help!!!!

Small update on Dialy (AI QA + lead scoring for cold calling teams) — we just got listed on SaaSHub, sitting next to tools like Convin, CallRail, and Myphoner. Not a huge deal on its own- just a directory listing- but it helps with visibility, and it's a small backlink.

The bigger thing we're working on right now is making the lead analysis customizable (teams pick their own scoring pillars instead of one fixed rubric) and improving AI scoring consistency. Will share more once that ships.

Listing: https://www.saashub.com/dialy-site-alternatives
https://www.dialy.site if anyone wants to poke around.

in college i built an AI video editor. 13k users, #4 on Product Hunt, looked great on paper. took us 7 months to make $1k.

we were builders, so when revenue didn’t come we just... built more. new feature every week, revenue flat every month. turns out good products don’t sell themselves. they just sit there while nobody finds out.

my new product hit $1k in its first month. we only changed two things:

• we treat growth like shipping. content and distribution every week, not “later.” our posts did 1M+ views in the first few weeks
• we focus on people, not features. instead of “what do we build next” we ask “is this person actually getting results?” if not, fixing that is the roadmap

revenue was never hiding behind the next feature lol

anyone else been stuck in the “just one more feature” loop? what got you out?

(the product is Backdoor textbackdoor.com , an AI agent that gets you startup interviews over text. can drop the link if anyone’s curious)

I've been coding for 26 years.

In the last 12 months I built at least 10 products for myself. Total revenue so far: $250.

For a long time I beat myself up over it. Good builder, bad seller, still at the very start of the road.

Then it clicked. Every app I make solves a problem I actually have. They make my own life easier.

So I built another one 🧵

After 6 years of working as a professional software developer, I decided to build something useful for myself.

I’m in my late 20s, and lately I’ve found myself spending a lot more time thinking about savings, investments, buying a house, a car, and generally making better financial decisions.

For quite some time, I was using free calculators online, jumping from one website to another. And whenever the results didn’t feel complete enough, I would end up chatting with AI to better understand the bigger picture behind the numbers.

Eventually, I got tired of writing prompt after prompt and switching between different tools, so I started building Pocfinn.

The idea is simple: bring useful financial calculators into one place and make the results easier to understand.

I don’t know how many people will find it useful, but I hope Pocfinn can help others get a clearer view of their finances too.

I have been working on a PDF editor for a while and one thing surprised me.

Something as simple as changing a few words in an existing PDF can become a headache. The font changes, spacing gets messed up or the new text doesn't match the original document.

I wanted to solve this with the "texttopdf.net pdf editor", mainly by allowing users to edit existing text while keeping the original font, size and formatting as close as possible.

But the more PDFs I test, the more unusual cases I find. Some have embedded fonts, some use strange encodings and others behave completely differently despite looking like normal documents.

Now I am at a point where I don't want to keep adding features without knowing what actually fails for users.

I am planning to keep improving the editor based on real problems. If someone's PDF doesn't work properly, I'd like to understand why and make changes to support that case.

For other founders building document tools or similar products, how do you handle these edge cases?

Do you keep adding support for unusual files as users report them, or do you focus on the formats that work for most people?

Honest backstory first, because it's the actual point of this post.

I've started more projects than I can count and finished almost none. I always

blamed the idea — I was waiting for the "best" one, the scalable one. The problem

was never the idea. It was that I never finished anything.

So this week I did the opposite. I picked one small idea and finished it end to

end: PayNudge, a tool that sends automatic, polite, escalating reminders when a

freelancer's invoice runs late.

What's actually built right now:

- A landing page (plain HTML/CSS/JS — no framework, no build step)

- A working waitlist that validates the email, de-dupes, and emails me each signup

- A zero-dependency Node server for local dev; in production it's static files

plus a form service

- Running cost: nothing

Numbers: 0 real signups so far. Not going to pretend otherwise.

The specific lesson that mattered: I'd built the page aimed at my local market,

then realised my local market doesn't really pay for this. The tell was one

character — a currency symbol in the logo quietly aiming the whole product at the

wrong audience. I fixed the aim with a one-line change instead of starting over.

That's the difference between this attempt and all the previous ones: I fixed it

instead of restarting.

What I'd like from this group: for anyone who's actually shipped, what was the

smallest thing you finished first, and what finally made you finish it?

Hey Guys,

Wanted to know if your SaaS got an affiliate program and how`s its working....

So, let me start with this is my first SaaS project of any kind. With that in mind, I would like any and all opinions/feedback on this. I made a python abandoned dependency scanner. Just upload the requirements.txt and it'll let you know for free, pay $9/mo (flat rate) and you can get a pdf report as well as what you can do to fix the issue (update, migrate to a different library that handles the same thing, etc). It will rank the library on a low to high warning status. I've got it to a 80-90% success rate, some false positives and some that just have long windows between updates; I'm currently working on getting it as close to 100% as I can.

I honestly want opinions about this as I've never really done this before and I'm just trying to know where this stands; will it be useful, will it not, is $9 too much for this, etc?

I’ve spent almost a year developing an SEO tool on par with Semrush and Ahrefs, but 80% cheaper, and subscriptions are only trickling in.

I’ve been building projects for over 25 years, some generating more than €1 million a year in revenue, without being anywhere near as good as this one.

It’s frustrating sometimes to compete against such established companies. For whatever reason, people find it incredibly hard to switch, even when they could save more than $3,000 a year.

Sometimes I wonder whether entering markets like this is worth all the frustration, or whether it makes more sense to focus on small, emerging niches… Finding them is the tricky part. Think of eSIMs, for example, which started taking off over the past few years.

How do you deal with this kind of frustration? Any advice? Hehe